“Strange there’s no motion,” thought Jacqueline the next morning, rubbing her eyes. “Why, what ails the old boat, I wonder?” Then she remembered. She was in the Tampico hotel which called itself a cafÉ, and the landlord’s wife was knocking on her door and calling “NiÑ-a, niÑ-a” with a plaintive stress on the first syllable. The word means girl, and oddly enough, is often used by a Mexican servant to address her mistress.

“I’m not a n-e-e-n-ya,” Jacqueline assured her drowsily, “and if I were, madame, why make a fÊte out of it this way in the middle of the night?”

“NiÑ-a,” the unctuous nasal rose higher, “if Your Mercy goes with Don Anastasio, she must hurry. It is late. It is four o’clock, niÑa.”

“Four o’clock–late?” gasped the luxurious little marquise. “And how much difference, exactly, would your four o’clocks make on the planet Mars, my good woman?”

“But niÑa, there is Don Anastasio, he is ready to start.”

“And who is Don Anastasio, pray?”

“The trader, niÑa, at the mesÓn. He is to take Your Mercy to Valles, as Don–as the Capitan Morel told Your Mercy yesterday.”

“The Capitan Morel, pardi! Faith, if any man had told 56 me it meant rising at any such unholy hour. Oh well, I suppose it is the hour for larks, too.”

And sighing at the sacrifice of an age of slumber, Jacqueline reached out for the matches. But there was no dainty limbed night table of a Louis XV. beside her bed, which helped her again to remember where she was, and if doubts still remained, they were gone when her bare feet touched the fibrous, prickly native carpet instead of soft furs.

She groped to the door, and opened it enough to take a greasily odorous candle from a dusky hand outside. As the sickly glimmer awakened the shadows, she called the woman back in sudden dismay. “My trunk, seÑora, kindly have it sent up at once. No,” she added, catching a fluffy garment from a chair, “in five minutes.”

There was a brief silence, followed by positive lament. “NiÑa, it is not here. I believe, niÑ-a, it is at the mesÓn, with Don Anastasio.”

“F-flute!” cried Jacqueline. The word means nothing at all, but it may express a lass’s exasperation in a wardrobe crisis, and that is nothing except a catastrophe. “Now just possibly,” she soliloquized, “they permit themselves to imagine that one can wear a white frock two days together,” whereupon she sat herself down despairingly among the crisp things that had already had their poor little day. To mock her there was the jaunty handsatchel packed for an hour’s shore leave. She let petulance have sway, and informed herself that she should not go a step, when the voice in the hall pleaded insidiously that Her Mercy make haste.

“But I am, seÑora, I’m making fast haste,” and she sat three minutes longer, communing with her tragedy. “Oh, this bitten, biting country,” she cried, gazing ruefully at arms and shoulders, and fiery blotches on the soft white skin. “Still, if there’s a brigand for every mosquito, it may yet be worth 57while.” Hopefully she rose and called Berthe from the next room to help her dress.

When the two girls came downstairs, the landlord’s wife took their satchel, and led them over broken sidewalks to the mesÓn, where the street was filled with torches and laden burros and blanketed shadows. MurguÍa’s caravan was forming, making a weird, stealthy scene of activity. Jacqueline picked up a lantern, and searched here and there.

“Now where can it be?” she cried.

The rebosa about the shoulders of the Mexican woman rose. She knew nothing. But the gesture was an unabridged philosophical system as to the resignation and the indifference that is seemly when one knows nothing. Jacqueline refrained from pinching her, and pursued the quest of her trunk even into the mesÓn.

Hardly had she passed within when a greatly agitated little old man tried to overtake her. But at the door he thought better of it and vented his chagrin on the Mexican woman.

“Why did you let her go in there?” he cried. “She will wake the Gringo, she will wake the Gringo!”

Jacqueline reappeared. “No trunk,” she announced. “Do you know, Berthe, I do not believe it came at all?”

The old man’s voice sounded at her elbow, faltering, placating. “With permission, seÑorita, we must be starting.”

“And similarly with permission, seÑor, who are you?”

“Anastasio MurguÍa, the servant of Your Mercy.”

“Ah, the poor little crow? Perhaps you will tell me, sir, why neither the SeÑor Ney nor Fra–nor Captain Morel is here?”

“The young French caballero had visited the fort last evening, he replied. Her Mercy knew that? Yes, precisamente. Yes, the caballero had spent the night up there with his compatriots of the garrison. Her Mercy did not know that? No? But it was quite exact, yes, because he, Don Anastasio, had been so informed. But the SeÑor Ney would meet them out 58of Tampico–yes, precisamente, with a detachment of cavalry from the fort.”

“That poor Michel!” said Jacqueline. “He’s determined that I am to have a French escort. But Captain Morel, seÑor?”

MurguÍa would not answer. He repeated the question to the Mexican woman, who took up explanations with a glib readiness. “Si, niÑa, I saw the capitan, not more than an hour ago. He was riding by the cafÉ, to meet his–Contra Guerrillas. But he stopped and woke me. He said that I was to bring Your Mercies here to the mesÓn, and to say that he would meet Your Mercies–yes, surely, before you had gone very far, niÑa.” Her tone was a sugared whine, and more than once she peered around at MurguÍa; while he, for his part, stood by as though overseeing a task. But Jacqueline only allowed herself a little inconsequential sniff, and went back to the really serious business that did worry her. She demanded her trunk.

“How, the seÑorita does not know?” asked MurguÍa.

“Know what?”

“That the sailors did not come back from the ship?”

“Not come back! Eh bien, I will not go a step.”

At first Don Anastasio’s pinched face lighted with relief. But at once a conflicting anxiety, lest she might not go, seemed to possess him. “But seÑorita,” he protested, “what will Your Mercy do? The ship, yes, seÑorita, the ship has sailed already. It left last night for Vera Cruz.”

“And here am I,” Jacqueline exclaimed, tapping her foot, “with only one dress!”

A long bubbling whistle sounded near a gendarme’s lantern in the middle of the street. A block away another sounded, then another, and another, and others yet, each thinly shrill and distant. It was the challenge to slumber and the answer of wakefulness from the watches of the night over the silent city.

59“Another quarter gone by!” MurguÍa exclaimed nervously. “Come, seÑoritas, if we are to reach the Valles stage by nightfall, we have no time to lose. There are your horses, I will––”

A tremor cut short his words. Someone had just emerged from the mesÓn.

“Gracious, Murgie, off so early?” the newcomer observed cheerily.

MurguÍa scowled. He knew that tone.

“If I’m late, I apologize,” the other drawled gently, from behind the flare of a match over his pipe. “Howsoever, all my eyes weren’t shut, and you wouldn’t of left me. Pretty quiet about striking camp, though! Didn’t want to disturb me, maybe? Well, well, who made you so thoughtful? Not Captain Morel? Now I wonder!”

“I uh, why should I wake you, Mis-ter Driscoll? Have I asked you even to go?”

“N-o, but you evidently asked old Demijohn there.” And Driscoll pointed to his horse, all saddled. “But cheer up, Convoluting Squirmer, of course I know you aren’t a horse thief. No, I just come out to say you forgot the blanket. I was sleeping on it.”

Then he turned to the two girls. They were going also. But why try to leave him behind, even without a horse? He knew, for all his whimsical cheerfulness, that something serious was afoot. It was hardly likely that the girls themselves had interfered. Still, he must make sure. To provoke a reply elsewhere, he asked MurguÍa if it were the seÑoritas, perhaps, and not Captain Morel, who preferred his absence? A surprised “Ma foi!” from Jacqueline answered him. As he supposed, she had not thought of him one way or another.

But she deigned to say, that since the American gentleman–there was a lingering on the word, which opened wide the Storm Centre’s eyes with anticipation of battle–that since the American gentleman had broached the subject of his going 60(as no doubt interesting him, being about himself), then she would permit herself to inquire why, indeed, he should be going with them at all. She had not observed any cordiality in the requests for his society.

The light was not good, and she did not see his lips pucker as for a long whistle. But he did not whistle. He replied very humbly; and so sweetly that MurguÍa quailed for the little shrew.

“W’y miss,” he said, “it all comes of feeling my responsibility. I’m the cause of your going, and that’s why I’m going too.”

His very earnestness gave her to understand that he had forgotten her entirely. The finesse of the Tuileries could not have struck home more delicately, and more keenly. “I’ve often heard,” she thought to herself, “that an awkward swordsman is dangerous.” But she made no cry of “touchÉe!” Instead she caught at the point to turn the blade aside. “Responsibility? Truly sir, you are considerate. But permit me–my safety on this trip, what concern can that have for Your Mercy?”

“None at all,” replied Driscoll, heartily.

His brow, none the less, was crinkled, and he watched dubiously as MurguÍa helped the two girls into great armchair-like saddles. There was not a woman’s saddle in Tampico, but Jeanne d’Aumerle did not mind that. She, the marchioness, enjoyed the oddity of a pommel in lieu of horn. And the lady’s maid might have been on a dromedary, for all the consciousness the poor child had of it.

“Say,” Driscoll interrupted with cool obstinacy, “where’s our friend the captain and that sky-blue Frenchman?”

MurguÍa pretended not to heed him. Jacqueline really did not. But Berthe spoke up eagerly. She said that the two gentlemen were to meet them later in the day. At least she hoped so, but–no, no, there could be no doubt of it! Yet her 61words faltered, and there was an appeal in them. But if she placed any hope in the strange American, she was quickly disappointed.

“All right,” he said, as if the matter were of no further consequence. “Then I can make a nice comfortable report to Maximilian.”

“Report to Maximiliano?” exclaimed MurguÍa.

Driscoll nodded indifferently.

“But SeÑor Coronel, when you do, you–you will remember that I said nothing to–that is, to persuade the seÑoritas to take this journey.”

“Nor not to take it, Wriggler.”

“Yet you will say to His Majesty that I did suggest–yes, I do now–that they had better not––”

His utterance drivelled to incoherency. The Mexican woman, she of the cafÉ, stood before him. There was a warning on her stolid countenance. MurguÍa wet his lips. “But,” he stammered, “there–oh what danger can there be in their going?”

Driscoll shoved him aside and placed himself at the head of Jacqueline’s horse. “You had better risk the water, miss,” he said quietly.

“My good sir,” she replied, clear and cold, “I commend your prudence, in making certain, before you dared touch my bridle-rein, that neither of the two gentlemen were here.”

Din Driscoll swung on his heel. “Damned!” he murmured, and he pronounced the “n” and the “d” thoroughly, to make the word adequate if possible. “Lord, I believe I feel like a closed incident! And to think, Demijohn,” he went on as he busied himself about his horse, “to think that it’s the first and only time we’ve ever seen trouble coming and tried to keep out of it.”

But the trouble might appear now, he had done what he could. The thought brightened him, and he patted his short 62ribs musingly. There was a friendly protuberance there on either side. His belt sagged comfortingly. He opened the pack which he was tying with his blanket behind his saddle, and from it he filled with cartridges the pockets of his rough cape coat.

By now the caravan was passing him. The burros, like square-shelled monstrosities with ears, were settling into a steady trot. Their blanketed arrieros ran beside them and prodded, and were in turn prodded by the fretful MurguÍa. Then Jacqueline rode by on an ambling little mountain-climber. She had forgotten his presence. This was not a pose with the Marquise d’Aumerle; she had, really. But her little Breton maid coming behind timidly drew rein. Driscoll looked and saw in the moving yellow torchlights that her face was white. A thing like that somehow alters a man’s attitude. “W’y, child,” he exclaimed, “what’s––”

“Monsi–seÑor,” she said hastily, in pathetic and pretty broken Spanish, “you, oh, you will not leave us! In the mercy of heaven, tell me that you will not! Ah, seigneur,” she sobbed, “mademoiselle will yet lead us to our death!”

“Berthe,” mademoiselle at that instant called, “oh you little ninny, are you coming ever?”

The maid obeyed. “Just the same,” she sighed, “God bless her!”

“And did I,” Driscoll had begun angrily, but she was already gone, and he finished it to himself, “did I once intend to leave you?”

He leaped astride his buckskin horse, who trotted with him briskly to the head of the caravan. Behind was Anastasio MurguÍa, a quaint combination of silk hat, shawl, and ranchero saddle. The two Frenchwomen followed, and behind came the straggling file of burros and pack horses.

Yet the American was as a solitary traveller leaving a town for the wilderness at the first touch of dawn. The road soon 63narrowed down to a trail as it wound through the undergrowth of the Huasteca lowlands, then westward toward a bluish line of mountains. At each cross trail the American would turn in his saddle to force an indication of their course from MurguÍa. Then on he would ride again, the while sinking deeper and deeper into his thoughts; thoughts of why he had come, of how he might succeed, and of the Surrender at that moment perhaps a fact. For him, though, there was his sabre yet, dangling there under his leg. And there were the sabres of comrades that likewise would not be given up, for to save them that shame was he in Mexico. Riding there, so much alone, and lonely, he was a rough, savage, military figure. But in his meditations, so grave and unwonted in the wild, hard-riding trooper lad, there was nothing to indicate a second nature in him, an instinct that was on the alert against every leafy clump and cactus and mesh of vine.